NSEP case studies

NSEP · Put your knowledge to work in context.

NSEP, the National Standard Examination in Physics, is the physics paper in the National Standard Examination (NSE) family run by the Indian Association of Physics Teachers (IAPT). It is the first step towards the international science olympiads and is open to school students: for NSEP, any student of class 12, 11 or 10 on 30.11.2026 who was born between 1.7.2007 and 30.6.2012, both days inclusive. The NSEP case studies are 5 cases and about 3,944 words.

A pendulum that will not keep time: separating amplitude error from length error

A Class 12 student is asked to measure the acceleration due to gravity with a simple pendulum and to state a realistic uncertainty. She clamps a fine steel wire between the jaws of a retort stand, hangs a steel sphere of diameter 2.00 cm on it, and uses a metre scale (least count 1 mm) to measure 1.000 m from the clamp jaws to the top of the sphere.

745 words, about 4 min 2

Rolling or skidding? A sphere that never starts to roll

A solid steel sphere of radius 2.0 cm and mass 50 g is released from rest at the top of a board 2.00 m long inclined at 30 degrees to the horizontal. The board carries a thin uniform coating whose coefficients of static and kinetic friction with steel are 0.12 and 0.10 respectively.

751 words, about 4 min 3

Where did the missing 300 joules go? Diagnosing a calorimetry result

A student measures the specific heat capacity of a metal block by the method of mixtures. The block, mass 100.0 g, is held in steam at 98.0 degrees C, then carried across the bench with tongs and dropped into 80.0 g of water at 24.0 degrees C held in a copper calorimeter of mass 50.0 g (c Cu = 0.385 J g^-1 K^-1).

859 words, about 4 min 4

Dielectric inserted with and without the battery: auditing the energy

A 20 cm x 20 cm parallel-plate capacitor with a 2.0 mm air gap is charged to 200 V from a regulated supply rated 200 V, 1 mA. A student then slides a 2.0 mm thick glass slab (dielectric constant 5.0) fully between the plates, doing it twice: in run A the supply stays connected throughout, in run B the supply is disconnected first.

790 words, about 4 min 5

Sharp image on a fixed screen: defocus, not a bad lens

A student is asked to project a translucent grid (grid spacing 1.0 mm) onto a wall using a plano-convex lens of focal length 10.0 cm and clear diameter 4.0 cm, at a linear magnification of 10. The wall bracket is fixed at 100 cm from the lens, and she places the grid 11.0 cm from the lens on the axis, setting the distance with a ruler to plus or minus 1 mm.

799 words, about 4 min